3 Shifts The CIO Must Master In Order To Provide Value

Change in your role as CIO is that fast. In seemingly no time, business departments are now employing their own IT staff. Those same departments are buying technology without consulting with you. Overall, you are making less IT decisions for the company, and much of your own IT work is being outsourced. The days of control have passed; the time of being only a cost center is in the history books. People are looking to you to be more than a Director of IT – and that is good news. You always have been more. Your love of what technology has longed for others to see its value. That day is here. But you must make some shifts, and you can’t wait to be invited to make them. You must demonstrate your value, or the thing you always knew technology could do will be entrusted to someone else.

Welcome to your new world of customer experience, data analysis and wise counsel.

The Shift to Customer Experience

Customer experience is the new brand differentiator. Price and product is becoming secondary to customer-business interaction. Consumers will pay more out of brand loyalty if such loyalty is rooted in experience; and one bad experience not handled to a customer’s satisfaction will be the end of the loyalty.

As CIO, you must now be aware of every customer’s touchpoint with the company, and how your technology meets customers at each point. To demonstrate your value, you must engage in multiple department interaction. Understanding the end user experience, and how each department feeds into that, you are now the champion of how technology serves their strategies. In this, you are aware of how changes in technology and new proposals for technology affect each department’s performance.

You are not just a cost center; you are a revenue driver. Over half the projects consuming the attention of a Chief Experience Officer involves technology.

The days of the CIO and IT staff being brought late into strategic development are far behind you. You must seat yourself at the table, in the beginning, designing the customer journey and being the champion each department needs for technology’s implementation.

The Shift to Data Analysis

Just like that, data is seated on the throne. As CIO, you are now a critical player in digital strategy. You do not need to be the Chief Digital Officer, a position that 90% of global companies will have in place by next year. But you do need training in analytics.

As a CIO trained in analytics, you further equip yourself to be a data source that helps departments solve problems. Your primary role is moving from a permission-giver (the old cost center mindset) to a prophet: Because of data, you can see what is needed before others, you can warn of regrettable actions departments might take, and you can direct leaders to the most efficient, cost-effective and customer-centric options available to them.

The Shift to Wise Counsel

The CIO now represents a consultative relationship rooted in strategic relevance. You have the opportunity to use your IT knowledge to inform better decisions. You are now more than bits and bytes. You create a digital, optimum performance place of work.

As CIO, you must be consulted on significant technical spending. There are aspects of past responsibilities that will remain in play. But you must also inform marketers what technology is capable of, and in places where technology, marketing, customer experience, sales and services seem blurred, emerge as the one to whom others turn for sound advice.

You live in an interesting tension. The CIO today that clings to the old model of business will find that people will look for ways to avoid them and get around them. Today, the CIO is a peer strategist and team player. IT is not a necessary evil; it serves every department in quest of the mission. To succeed, to demonstrate your continued value, you must shift into areas foreign to your previous job descriptions. You are now the heart of every customer experience; you are the knowledge pool of business decision making; you are the sage who has stepped out of the shadow to guide the many.